Determining size, demographics, and media exposure and/or consumption patterns of a media audience helps media providers to understand their audience and better tailor their media content. Further, accurate media exposure demographics allow advertisers to target media content to audiences of a desired size and/or audiences comprising members having a set of common desired characteristics (e.g., income level, lifestyles, interests, etc.) associated with typical buyers of the advertised product or service.
In order to collect demographics of audiences, an audience measurement company may enlist a number of media utilizing households and/or consumers (e.g., panelists) to cooperate in an audience measurement study for a period of time. The media usage habits of these panelists, as well as demographic data about these panelists, are collected using automated and/or manual collection methods. The collected data is subsequently used to generate informational statistics related to media exposure, including, for example, audience sizes, audience demographics, audience preferences, the total number of hours of media exposed per audience member and/or per region, program ratings, etc.
Traditional audience measurement systems have employed a client/server architecture wherein the client (e.g., a metering device) and server (e.g., a data collection unit to collect data from the metering device) are in different physical locations. For example, in a typical system, the client is located near an audience member being monitored (e.g., attached to or otherwise in proximity to a television, included in a portable device carried by the audience member, etc.). The server is typically located at an off-site location that is away from the client (e.g., a central office of an audience measurement company such as the Nielsen Company, etc.) The client typically collects audience measurement data and transmits the same to the server. The server then analyzes audience measurement data from a number of panelists to identify ratings, trends, etc.